Wendysdottir
by jetplanejane
Summary: Years ago, Loki befriended Jane's mother and brought her to Asgard. Now he keeps a promise to Jane to show her the Realm Eternal. But, really, she's no more than an amusement, someone to congratulate him on his cleverness and admire his tricks - the Wendy to his Peter. At least that's what Loki tells himself. It's not like he actually cares for her, or does he? AU Peter Pan Lokane.


It was the dullest party he'd ever attended: somber faces, hushed conversations, and no sign of his beloved mortal, Wendy – his faithful Midgardian shadow. It really was quite rude of her not to be there to greet him after all the trouble he'd gone to locate her. Loki was supremely pleased with himself for managing the task without Heimdall's help, but he was beginning to feel disappointed and frustrated in his search.

The only other place he hadn't looked was the attic. "Wendy, darling?" he called up as he ascended the narrow flight of steps behind the door at the end of the hall.

She was there, waiting for him. Not Wendy, no – she was too young; a girl on the cusp of adolescence – but a part of her. In the eyes and mouth – deep down inside her bones. The girl had been hunched over the antique brass telescope that had belonged to Wendy and Loki knew at once that this was his mortal's offspring. Had it really been _that_em long since he'd seen her? During his investigation into her whereabouts he'd discovered she was married (he'd come to steal her away, invite her back to Asgard for one last adventure), but he'd had no idea she'd mothered a child.

She looked like the saddest girl in all the world. Had the grownups confined her to this space for the duration of their dull affair? Loki remembered being ushered from Gladsheim while his brother was permitted to feast with the elders.

"You're not missing anything. It's not much of a party," he said, sympathetically. "What's the occasion anyway?"

The child looked confused. "It's a _wake_. For my mother."

"A 'wake'? Has she been asleep long?"

The silence grew awkward. "She died."

"_Died?"_ It was almost as if the mortality of Midgardians had never occurred to Loki before that moment. He stared at the girl with a sudden kind of terrible understanding. Wendy had loved him, by her own embarrassing, tearful admission. He had hardly been capable of loving her in return – not the way she wanted – but he had cared for her, after a fashion. She had been his adoring little mortal and now she had ceased to _be_. He felt a momentary pang of something that was more disappointment than sadness. "I'm sorry," he said, finding the appropriate response, though if he felt sorry for anyone it was himself.

"Are you okay?" People had been tiptoeing around Jane for a week, asking her that question – as if they expected her to be or to answer differently each time – so she felt relieved to finally be able to ask someone else.

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"

Jane shrugged. She thought he looked almost sad. "You were a friend of hers? A colleague?"

"I am Loki, Prince of Asgard." He had been poised on the top step and now he finally ducked inside the attic. "Surely your mother mentioned me."

"A prince?"

She had Wendy's skeptical smile. He asked, "What's your name?"

"Jane."

A plain, uninteresting name, he thought, for a plain and uninteresting girl. Except that she was Wendy's daughter. "Did your mother tell you nothing of her adventures in Asgard?"

"Adventures?" Her parents were the least adventurous people on the planet! "Where's Asgard?"

He nodded toward the telescope. "Can you find Ursa Minor?"

"That's where you're from? Asgard's in outer space?"

The skepticism had become utter disbelief, but then Wendy had been no different. "Second star to the right of the bear's tail."

"Yildun?"

He had to stoop as he approached. The attic smelled of pine and dust and Wendy – the denim jacket that Jane wore still carried her mother's scent. He searched the light-polluted sky for the constellation and allowed Jane her turn at the viewfinder. "Well, that general direction, for a few hundred million light years."

"A few hundred million light years?" Jane chortled.

"Perhaps when you're older I shall prove it to you and take you there."

_No, you won't,_ Jane thought, dipping her head to the lens. Not that she did _really_ believe him in the first place. Except for Polaris, Ursa Minor was invisible, washed out by the street lights. "I don't see…" She turned toward where he had been, a slender young man in a suit, but Loki was gone. She searched the house for him, but he wasn't there and no one she asked had seen him. Jane had begun to doubt his existence; perhaps she was having some sort of episode, but when she returned to the attic, she spotted him through the telescope. He was standing on the sidewalk staring up at the same stars that had transfixed both her and her mother. Feeling the girl's eyes on his back, Loki turned his gaze back to the house. Young Jane Foster watched him with cautious interest from behind the telescope. He smiled, knowingly, turned his angular face to the offensive street lamp and with a flick of his wrist, it winked out. The girl's mouth dropped, aghast, as one by one, the lights went out, dominoing the neighborhood into darkness.

"Second star to the right!" he shouted up, amused by her expression.

Jane wanted to call after him, to know how he'd done that, but he was already walking away.

The sky opened up, bigger and more beautiful than she'd ever seen it during her short stay in London.

* * *

Years later she found the photograph, tucked inside her mother's childhood copy of _Peter and Wendy_: a handsome young man with a supercilious smile and an American grad student hanging onto his neck. On the back of the grainy Polaroid, in smudged, age-faded ink, it read: _With Peter._ It was dated three years before Jane's birth.

She stared at it for the longest time. 'Peter' was the man she recognized as the mysterious stranger who'd come to pay his respects (if that's what they were) the day they buried her mother. He hadn't visibly aged between the taking of the photo and the evening of her mother's wake. Perhaps she had imagined him, Jane thought, before her fiancé's keys in the door forced her to hastily shove the photo back in the book and slot it into the bookshelf she would, for the foreseeable future, be sharing with Donald Blake's medical journals. And there it might have remained, no more than a peculiar celluloid memory were it not for the blackout a couple of months later.

Donald had persuaded her to leave her very important data analysis and accompany him to a hospital fundraiser. Jane was hating very nearly every moment of it; dragged from conversation to conversation – and as soon as she'd try to introduce herself, Donald would interrupt her with 'This is my fiancé'. Jane felt like a possession, like a _trophy_. He didn't even bother to tell them her name! The boredom and her own suppressed, polite frustration prompted her to make a game of it: each time she was introduced as the 'fiancé' or 'girlfriend', she took a sip of champagne.

After an hour Jane felt more than a little light-headed and excused herself, slipping outside for some fresh air. It was late August, but the Albuquerque nights were still cool.

"Quite a party." The voice was low and silky in her ear. "No one died this time, I hope."

She turned to the man in the suit; the boyish face with the aristocratic nose, hair the color of mayhem after midnight slicked back severely from his face; eyes backlit an angelic light. He smiled ever so slightly, mischief tucked at the corners of his lips like he could turn her world upside down and inside out.

"_You."_

A broad, pleased smile widened on his face. "You remember."

She remembered the prince in the attic, the man in the Polaroid. Except it _couldn't_ be him. It had been almost twenty years since he'd peered through the telescope, but he hadn't aged a day.

"And you, Jane Foster," Loki continued, peering thoroughly at her, "all grown up."

"You made the lights go out."

"Is that all?" He gestured expansively, palms turned to the heavens. "I would say that I showed you the stars."

"How did you – Who _are_ you?" How had he even _found_ her?

"Have you really forgotten who I am? How disappointing." He tucked his hands behind his back. "I am Loki –"

"Of Asgard, yeah, no, I remember. I looked it up. Asgard's a myth, and so is the 'god of mischief'. Your name's Peter. You're some British guy my mother met during her graduate studies." She had, she told him, the photo to prove it.

"No one's ever accused me of being 'British' before. Your mother sometimes called me Peter, though," Loki revealed. "She said I reminded her of a boy she'd once read about. I assure you, Jane, I am no myth. Did I not say I would show you Asgard one day? Tonight seems as good a night as any."

"Excuse me, I'm not going anywhere with you."

"Funny. Your mother said the same thing." Loki leaned casually against the balustrade and cast his gaze out over the city for a moment. It was nowhere near as interesting as Jane. "She, too, took some convincing."

"I'm going inside now."

Loki straightened. "Best watch your step then. It's about to get a little dark."

It was not a flick of the wrist this time, but rather a slow sweeping motion of his hand. The steel and glass of the cliff-top house was suddenly plunged into darkness. From inside Jane heard shattered glass and guests' calls of alarm. And then the lights went out, grid after grid cascading Albuquerque into darkness.

That was no mere trick or coincidence (an act of terrorism, maybe), but when she looked at Loki his neck was craned toward the sky.

"Sometimes I can see why your mother loved it."

Jane followed his gaze: a river of stars hung along the galaxy's elliptical plane. It had been a long time since she had been stargazing. Astrophysics wasn't exactly a romantic discipline. Most of her work involved mathematics, hours of pouring over computational data. "Wow."

Loki's eyes lingered on her swan neck and her bare shoulders. "Quite lovely."

Jane met his gaze. "How did you…?"

"If you come with me, I'll show you."

"To Asgard?" She wanted to laugh. Despite what she'd witnessed, in spite of his charm (and attractiveness, yes, that, too) he still lacked credibility. She was a little drunk and a little flirty so she decided to humor him. "How would we get there?"

"One of three ways that I can think of. Bifrost – your mother called an 'Einstein-Rosen' bridge – or via –"

Jane sobered. "Excuse me? Did you just say an Einstein-Rosen bridge?"

He had her attention now. Loki was speaking her language. "Engineered, of course. But my father would be ill-pleased if I brought you along such a route – if I brought you along at all. He doesn't care for mortals."

"Wait, hold on, did you just say –?"

"You'll come with me then?"

Of course she was going to go with him! She wanted to hear what he had to say about Einstein-Rosen bridges. Then she thought about Donald. "I'm sort of here with someone…"

In the dark, Loki's smile was almost luminescent and Cheshire-like. "Well, of course, you're here with me."

"I mean my fiancé."

"You're actually betrothed to that oaf I saw you with earlier? Your mother had better taste." His silhouette began to glow with a shimmering golden hue, the suit morphing into theatrical stage clothing as he approached her. _How is he_ doing _that?_ Jane wondered. Some sort of holographic projection? She reached out her hand and poked him in the chest to gauge his solidity, his realness.

"Jane?" She heard Donald and turned in time to see him collide with the glass sliding door.

Loki smirked proudly as if that little prank had been all his doing, and then boldly took Jane's hand. "Would you rather spend the night being his trophy or my accomplice?"

"_Accomplice?"_ The sensible side of Jane didn't like the sound of that.

"I'll have you home, safe and sound, before sunrise, I promise."

Donald was trying, hopelessly to pry the door open. "Jane!"

Her mouth formed words of protest, reason overcoming foolish romanticism and recklessness, but Loki pulled her along – _away_ from the pool and the house and Donald. Jane _allowed_ herself to be led away.

"I'm warning you," she threatened, "if you try anything, I have a taser in my purse and I will use it, I swear."

"Ooh, a 'taser'. Sounds dangerous." Loki didn't sound the least bit alarmed at the prospect. "You have nothing to fear from me. Now –" They had reached the driveway – "Climb on."

He mounted a motorcycle; some kind of chopper that had no business being between the legs of a sophisticated-accented prince in his ridiculous leather and metal getup. "This is yours?"

"Well, yes." At least since he'd stolen it from the bar on the way into Albuquerque.

Reluctantly, Jane hiked up her dress and swung on awkwardly behind him. "I'm not exactly dressed for this. Can't you just…teleport us there, or something?"

"I already did that once tonight. It's not especially easy, or fun."

_He's going to kill me,_ she thought, as she wrapped her arms around his waist.

* * *

He drove them out beyond the city limits, onto a dirt road that skirted a reservation and ended at the edge of a playa. When she climbed off the bike, her skin was dimpled with gooseflesh and her legs felt like a bit like Jell-O. Loki shrugged out of his cloak and draped it across her shoulders. "Better?" he asked.

"Thank you," she said, traipsing after him as he crossed the flat. She _really_ wasn't dressed for the terrain, but stepping on a scorpion would be the least of her problems if he turned out that this Loki was a Hitchcockian psychopath.

"Do you see any footprints?"

"Footprints?" Except for the bike's headlamp, it was completely dark, yet Loki was circling this spot like a dog on a scent.

He picked up a sailing stone and skipped it across the sand in a north-westerly direction. The stone bounced thrice and then vanished into the cold desert air. "There."

Jane had seen illusionists make things disappear – or rather _fool_ their audiences into making them think things had disappeared – but nothing like this. Perhaps it was a trick of her eyes, poorly adjusted for nightvision, but she asked, "How did you do that?"

"I didn't. Yggdrasil has many secret pathways. One just has to know where to look. The All-Father might not care for mortals, but it's quite fine for him to come here and lord over you like some benevolent god. And Thor…he can have adventures in whatever realm he pleases while I'm expected to be content to just sit around Gladsheim. I think not."

Jane didn't know what to think. She had _no_ idea what he was talking about, only that he seemed a little childish and bitter.

"You'll be my secret, Wendysdottir." He smiled perfectly at her and held out his hand. "Come with me. I promise, what I have to show you? You couldn't see at the end of your best telescopes."

Jane glanced back toward the bike. She might still outrun him if she ditched the shoes –provided he didn't use any of his…tricks – but she had no idea how to ride one herself. "Is it safe?"

"Well, nothing ever happened to Wendy. Of course," he added, cheerfully, "there's a first time for everything."

"That's reassuring."

Loki laughed. "I jest! You're far too serious, Jane Foster." He slid an arm around her waist and drew her close – the soft leather and the metal of his clothing was cold through her dress.

"Safe and sound and home before sunrise," he repeated and then Loki stepped back and Jane felt herself being pulled along, being sucked sideways through the air. One moment she was standing on the desert floor and the next she was lying on her back staring up at a strange sky hung with taffy-like nebulae cradling bright, young stars.


End file.
